Frontlines: Fuel of War

This is a game that's got a couple of big ambitions. The first is to provide a large-scale multiplayer experience along the lines of Battlefield: Modern Combat. That means in addition to running around on foot, you can jump in and control a variety of vehicles on the battlefield. However, it also wants to add what Battlefield sorely lacks, which is a compelling single-player experience. Perhaps the most impressive level is a completely war-torn cityscape that has gutted skyscrapers everywhere. Even more startling is that you can actually get into some of these towering husks, which gives you an incredibly high perch. While that might seem a bit unfair, keep in mind that there are many ways for other players to get at you, such as the remote-controlled air drones that can fly up and shred you with guns or rockets.

Frontlines: Fuel of War - well ATI can't win them all of course. NVIDIA is really strong in this title. That's good performance, in-game everything possible image quality wise is maxed out, beautiful to look at and a very consistent framerate up to 2560x1600.

3DMark Vantage (DirectX 10)

3DMark Vantage focuses on the two areas most critical to gaming performance: the CPU and the GPU. With the emergence of multi-package and multi-core configurations on both the CPU and GPU side, the performance scale of these areas has widened, and the visual and gameplay effects made possible by these configurations are accordingly wide-ranging. This makes covering the entire spectrum of 3D gaming a difficult task. 3DMark Vantage solves this problem in three ways:

1. Isolate GPU and CPU performance benchmarking into separate tests,2. Cover several visual and gameplay effects and techniques in four different tests, and3. Introduce visual quality presets to scale the graphics test load up through the highest-end hardware.

To this end, 3DMark Vantage has two GPU tests, each with a different emphasis on various visual techniques, and two CPU tests, which cover the two most common CPU-side tasks: Physics Simulation and AI. It also has four visual quality presets (Entry, Performance, High, and Extreme) available in the Advanced and Professional versions, which increase the graphics load successively for even more visual quality. Each preset will produce a separate, official 3DMark Score, tagged with the preset in question.

The graphics tests will have four quality presets available: Entry, Performance, High and Extreme. Each preset specifies a certain setting for the rendering options. The graphics load increases significantly from the lowest to the highest preset. The Performance preset is targeted for mid-range hardware with 256 MB of graphics memory. The Entry preset is targeted for integrated and low-end hardware with 128 MB of graphics memory. The higher presets require 512MB of graphics memory, and are targeted for high-end and multi-GPU systems.

Some hate it, some love it, here are the 3DMark Vantage score results. A GPU score of near 9000 points is just lovely. 3DMark06 returns almost 13.000 points.

AMD ATI Radeon HD 4870 1024MB reviewToday a test and review on the new AMD ATI Radeon HD 4870 1024MB. Obviously ATI is releasing a 1GB model to compete with the new Core 216 version of that GeForce GTX 260. The 4870 series really diggs that GDDR5 memory bandwidth, and what's the cheapest thing to do to gain some extra performance ? Increase the framebuffer volume. Now that by itself is not going to work miracles, yet in memory limited situations (loads of high quality textures, filtering and AA modes) it will help you here and there. And a little bit of extra bite is all the product needs to get beat that Core 216 card again.

AMD ATI Radeon HD 4850 CrossfireA review with Crossfire results as well, on the all new Radeon HD 4850 from Force3D and PowerColor. Definitely a review worth reading.

AMD ATI Radeon 3850 & 3870 reviewToday AMD will launch the Radeon 3000 series products, in specifically the Radeon HD 3850 and 3870. I'll give you a quick hint, these cards are roughly as fast a Radeon HD 2900 XT .. yet they are priced a very promising level; how does a price range of 149 to 249 USD sound ? See, performance wise a 149 USD Radeon HD 3850 will wipe the floor with the entire competitors GeForce 8500/8600 series easily and the 3870 will put up a great fight with the 8800 GTS. With new releases often also we can see a couple of new tricks. Today's announced products will see light of in the form of DirectX 10.1 support, the new UVD (video de/encoding) engine is now integrated opposed to the 2900 XT which didn't have it. Full PCI-Express 2.0 support, and a die-size based on 55nm to die for.